Personal-computer manufacturers and sellers often offer via-telephone and on-site repair services. Yet purchasers—particularly home, home-office and small-office purchasers—readily complain that their service contract offers less service than they expected. For example, a computer seller may dispatch a technician only after the purchaser calls the help center, performs a number of tests under the direction of the help center, escalates the problem at the telephone help center and performs redundant or additional tests under the direction of a putatively more knowledgeable telephone-help staff. The purchaser may have to escalate the problem still further and perform additional redundant tests before a repair technician is dispatched.
Frequently, the help center directs the customer to cycle the power on the computer, to re-boot the computer, to detach and reattach peripherals in question and to re-install application and operating-system software. Each call to the help center and each level of escalation may require the purchaser to cycle, re-boot, detach and reattach.
Detaching and reattaching peripherals can be extremely inconvenient. USB devices, for example, typically attach at the back of a computer in a location difficult to reach. In any event, the non-digerati purchaser may fear disassembling his computer, worrying that he may damage the computer further.
Help centers even direct a customer to reformat the boot drive of the computer and re-install operating-system and application software. Re-formatting is an onerous task for several reasons. Firstly, the home, home-office and small-office user rarely reformats a drive in the normal operation of his computer and is unfamiliar with the process itself. Secondly, reformatting destroys all the data on the drive, and such a user understandably becomes anxious on finding out that he will lose all of his data. Thirdly, such a user may not retain the application or operating-system installation media, especially where the seller pre-installs the software. The user may have been unsure which media to keep, or intending to keep a particular media, is in fact unable to locate that media later when needed.
Fourthly, the user typically does not back up his drives as often as an information technologist would recommend. That he will have to rely on his back ups (if any) if he is to have any hope of restoring his application is then not a comforting thought.
Accordingly, the art evinces a need for a computer that reduces or even eliminates the need for a user to call a help line, to keep installation media, to attach and reattach peripherals at the port, etc. Indeed, a computer that reduces or eliminates the technical savvy its user needs to effect repairs is desirable.
These and other goals of the invention will be readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art on reading the background above and the description below.
(The drawings are not to scale.)